7. Tools & Features

7.1 Staging

You can create a staging site by visiting the Staging tab of your Hosting Hub. Simply follow the prompts there to create and access your new staging site, which is a full copy of your live site. Perfect for trying out new plugins or themes, proofing content changes, and other development work.

Important Notes About Staging

Password Protection is required for staging to help ensure that staging sites aren’t indexed by search engines and that your staging site is not visited others. The password is not the same as any WordPress user account and can be set from your Hosting Hub.

Object Cache is not enabled on staging sites. This will make staging sites a bit slower than your production sites but helps make development easier.

You can sync a new copy of your production site to your staging site at any time.

When you push a copy of the staging site to your production site, we will automatically make a backup of your production site first. This helps with fast recovery should you need it.

7.2 Password Protection

You have the option of enabling ‘Password Protection’ on any site. This is useful when developing a new site that you don’t want yet publicly available on the web. You can share the username and password with clients or colleagues too.

7.3 Object Cache

We leverage Object Cache at the database level, and this is enabled by default on all sites we host. Object Cache improves performance by minimizing server load related to queries that are frequently called by WordPress, plugins, and themes. Because of this, you may need to clear Object Cache from your Hosting Hub after using a plugin that interacts directly with the database in ways outside of normal WordPress guidelines. Or if you make changes directly in your database using PHPMyAdmin.

To clear cache, visit the Tools menu item in your Hosting Hub.

7.4 Analytics

We keep track of visits, pageviews, and bandwidth information under the Analytics tab of your Hosting Hub.

You may see some discrepancies between the stats here and from 3rd party services such as Google Analytics or Jetpack Stats. This is because different tools track logged in activity and traffic from bots in different ways.